(Keeping) Worlds Apart

It is I, Celeste the Great and Powerful! Okay, at least one of those things is true. I just got off of like my 3rd 8-hour shift in a row, and I’m pretty dead, but my fingers still work, hence blog time! (And actually I’m feeling better than I would have guessed, so I suppose I’m acclimating to my new money-making rituals!) (Okay, that last bit made it sound sketchy. I JUST WORK AT MACYS, PEOPLE. Dang.)

So okay. Last night, when I should have been sleeping but was annoyingly wide awake, I did what was intended to simply be a rough sketch but eventually became a pretty detailed drawing of the map of Lysaran for my book! (Book-in-progress.) I love making maps, actually. This could be because I ignore a lot of the important science-y things involved, like making sure that your planet’s biosphere makes sense, that the areas of desert and not-desert are placed accurately, etc, but either way. Someone will either tell me it doesn’t work in the future or ignore it. So it goes.

Look at that. Freakin’ beautiful. With angels eating the corners and everything. Unf.

THE POINT IS, as I was messing around with that, I was understandably thinking about my other world-building fantasy novel, Mercenary, which I was working on until I had my brain-blast that became Life of Gaia. And I thought about how difficult it was to come up with two worlds that were in the same genre, the same general era, but were completely different. I actually wondered about setting them both in the same place, but that didn’t work for about a billion different reasons, so I immediately trashed the idea. Still, it was kind of exhausting, thinking about trying to be accurate with ONE world, let alone two!

I think the basic difference is really in how they’re written, and intended to be read. Life of Gaia is, for instance, more YA/NA, with modern-y dialogue at times and a… somewhat simpler setting overall. I’ve come up with some fun stuff for it, but less of that will come across all the time, since most of the focus is on Gaia, the characters, and their battles with the bad guy.

Mercenary, on the other hand, is intended to be more NA/Adult in themes and writing, and that’s the one where I spent most of my time trying to come up with background, religions, lore, thousands of years of tectonic movement… you know, the complex stuff. Not that I think I skimped where it mattered on those parts for LoG, but they’re just not so pervasive, you know? There isn’t as much sitting around the campfire, telling stories and being philosophical in LoG–it’s more running from monsters and shooting fireballs over your shoulder, or dealing with teenager angst in fantasy land. (Which, oddly enough, is a lot like regular teenage angst. Some things are timeless.)

So, this was mostly a rambly post where I talked about how I’m trying to come up with two worlds that could have been the same world, sort-of-but-not, and yet trying to give them their own identities.

What about other writers? Do you really enjoy the world building? Do you have several, or do you keep most of your stories in the same world, whether this one or a made-up one?

Now to soak my feet and go to bed–assuming my brain doesn’t keep me up with ideas again. TSK, BRAIN.